Monday, 13 June 2011

Will find nice sensible boyfriend, and not continue to form romantic attachments to peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional f***wits or perverts.

Ten years ago, a film came out, that I honestly believed was predicting my own future. Okay, so I was only seventeen years old, at the time, but when you're seventeen, a long-term singleton, and of course, female, you do have a tendency to be a little bit melodramatic. Okay, incredibly melodramatic. That film, is (no surprises) Bridget Jones's Diary.

Skip forward to a few months back, and I came across a poll on a website, which annoyingly, I can't remember, that was asking if people still felt that Helen Fielding's novel, and film were still representative of modern female culture?

My answer was automatically "No", because although I am still at a younger age, than Bridget was in the novel, I am in a long-term relationship, and so are the majority of the people I know. To demonstrate that fact, I decided to conduct some research, using my lovely friends on Facebook. And here are the results of my little experiment.

I discovered that out of everyone on my Facebook Friends List, 53 of them were aged between 25 and 40, and it was these 53 people that I used as part of my research.

Out of all of those people (male and female), just over three quarters are either married or in a long-term relationship and just under a quarter are currently single. And, of those that are currently in a long-term relationship, only one had been in it for less than a year! Also, those in a long-term relationship made up just over 50% of the overall count.

I should also point out, that not one of those that fit into this particular (and yes, quite wide) age range had ever been divorced. I know that there's still time for change in that one, but I just found that fact to be quite interesting.

Now, of course, I know that the area that most of my friends come from, is not metropolitan, which may effect this result, but only two of the ladies featured in my research are unemployed, and in both cases they are actually stay-at-home mums. So, it's fair to analyse that 99% of the women studied have jobs, with most in jobs that they enjoy.

So, perhaps if I'd done research, containing more people from larger cities, the result might have been a different story, but it's still interesting no less.

Do you think that the Bridget Jones Effect still exists? Or do you think women have moved on, and perhaps learnt to juggle career and relationships a bit better? Or perhaps, the fact that the largest portion are simply in a long-term relationship, without the commitment of marriage (although many do have children), is a factor? If there has been change, what do you think has caused, because I honestly have no idea :)